


The Founding of Midnight Margaritas

by Scylla



Category: Practical Magic (1998)
Genre: Backstory, F/M, Gen, Humor, Margaritas, Sisters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-17
Updated: 2010-12-17
Packaged: 2017-10-13 17:26:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/139810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scylla/pseuds/Scylla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the Owens family: NOTHING is ever simple! When one of Sally's products begins wreaking havoc across the island, Aunt Frances and Aunt Jet come to the rescue. What follows is a convoluted story about love, loss... and limes. Lots of limes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Founding of Midnight Margaritas

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lina (lookslikelove)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lookslikelove/gifts).



The containers of Organic Sugared Lime Peel Body Scrub went on the shelf on Monday. Months ago, Sally perfected the recipe on the scarred, heavy table in the center of the kitchen. A week ago, an order went to Spain for crates of (admittedly expensive) limes from Barbados. When they arrived, Sally turned the back room of Verbena into a gloved-and-aproned science lab for a week. She and her two associates – Linda and Carla – peeled, ground, mixed, and sealed the fragrant citrus concoction into plastic jars.

By Friday, Organic Sugared Lime Peel Body Scrub nearly destroyed Sally's reputation and the complexions of a quarter of the feminine population on Whidbey Island.

The first distraught customer arrived at Verbena on Wednesday.

Betty desPlaines - she insisted upon the capitalization _just so_ – had developed into a regular patron. The Owens family concluded their existence as the black sheep of the island a few months ago. Not one to throw stones when it was no longer fashionable, Betty felt no need to abstain from indulging in all the creams, soaps, and oils her vanity lusted for in the Verbena storefront.

She wasn't a pretty woman by any stretch, but as a real estate agent, Betty knew how to advertise her best features – specifically her rare, flawless, peaches-and-cream skin. Needless to say, when things went awry with the Organic Sugared Lime Peel Body Scrub, that smooth, buff-colored masterpiece was the first thing to go.

Up to her elbows in restocking and product rotation, Sally didn't immediately look up when the entry bell chimed. However, at Carla's swift intake of breath, she lifted her eyes from bottles of bath oil to see an unholy creature standing on the mat.

It was wearing Betty desPlaines' blue satin pantsuit. And holding a container of their newest product.

"Sally Owens," Betty said evenly, "I would like my money back. This product is obviously defective." She gestured to her face with one red, blotchy hand. Every inch of bare skin from the collarbones up was patched in lobster red and laced with peeling flakes. At the edge of her collar, Sally could even make out the rounded prints where her fingertips had touched. To be honest, it looked as if she'd rubbed her face with poison oak leaves.

Sally shook her head in disbelief. "We tested that! We had the first box tested for the state! I don't understand how this—" Her hands pedaled wildly, outspread, as if to ward off the demons of misfortune descending.

"My lawyers will be _most_ interested in seeing the documentation of all that, as well as your license to operate in the state of Washington," Betty replied, still in the same gentle, even, inflexible tone. "But in the meantime, _I would like my money back._ "

Sally didn't need her 'special' abilities to feel the tremors of outrage shivering around Betty. She couldn't think of an answer, so she went to the cash register to do what little there was left to do.

Carla spoke up for her. "Was that the only thing you've used in the past few days, honey?" she asked Betty, still rigid and blotchy on the mat. If anything, Betty got a little more rigid at the question. Whether or not she flushed was difficult to discern.

"I use a _variety_ of products, Ms.—"

"Carla," Carla volunteered sunnily. Betty's lips thinned, twitching now and again as if the expression hurt. It probably did.

"Carla. This was the only thing I used that I have not used multiple times prior. I have had no problems with any of them."

"When was the first time you used it, honey?" Carla jutted out a hip and stuck a hand on the point of it. The only thing missing from her fortysomething teenage Cindy Lauper demeanor was a gauzy pink headband and a massive wad of blue bubblegum.

"Last. _Night._ " Betty punctuated the latter word so heavily that it could have driven a nail in the wall. Shifted into full-on prey mode, Sally ducked without realizing she'd done it. Quickly, she counted out the bills and change and carried them over to Betty. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Linda shushing Carla.

"Betty, I'm so sorry," Sally said, the beginnings of a nervous shiver in her voice as she handed over the cash, "I don't understand how this could happen, I—" she reached out for the container of leftover scrub, but Betty snatched it back.

"Not quite, Ms. Owens," Betty said. "I'm sure my lawyers will want to have this tested. _Privately._ " She turned on one expensive heel and exited the shop after that, leaving only the jingle of the entry bell to mark her going.

Betty desPlaines was only the beginning of their troubles. Minutes later, the shop phone rang.

Before they closed for the day, there were twelve cases in all, ranging in severity from rashes and sunburn to skin the same vaguely reptilian quality as Betty's.

By the next day, the number increased to thirty-eight. The state faxed Sally her test results. Everything checked out perfectly. They wanted more samples, of course.

"On the positive side," Linda said, squeezing Sally's neck, "it was _really_ popular."

Sally groaned and crumpled the test results to her forehead.

* * *

The Aunts were sympathetic. Then again, they always were, as long as it didn't involve Sally's previous aversions to her own magical talent. Aunt Jet left a cranberry-pecan muffin at Sally's elbow and distracted the girls after school. Aunt Frances refilled her coffee and looked up a number or two in the phone book for her. Otherwise, they left her more or less unbothered until she emerged from her room with a loose plan of action, shortly before dinner.

She felt about as close to explaining as she'd felt all day. The Aunts made fresh cups of coffee, joined her at the kitchen table, and listened. Explaining became frustrated raving, but they listened. Aunt Jet brought a bowl of rosemary with her, stripping the leaves from the stem with precision born of experience.

When the laundry list of frustration made a left turn into the laundry list of ingredients that should _not_ be making the skin of normal women erupt like Vesuvius, by God, Sally noticed a little tension. She was too wrapped up in her own story by then to pay much attention, but didn't miss the long looks they cast one another.

"What?" Sally asked, "What is it?" After a pregnant pause, she stroked her palm over her face in aggravation and groaned yet again. "How. _How_ can this be about magic? Never mind that. Oh God. Oh God, I don't want to know what you know. It's never good." She eyed the spoon in her coffee mug, considering committing harakiri right there at the dining room table with it. "Have I killed my customers? Did I make body scrub that's going to kill people?"

"No you didn't, dear," Aunt Jet reassured. Her fingers made a faint _zipping_ sound as she stripped another rosemary branch bare.

"At least, not yet," Aunt Frances added, looking into her coffee.

Aunt Jet cast Aunt Frances an exasperated glare. Aunt Frances spread her palms. "It's true, isn't it?"

"So it is going to kill people? I shouldn't have come back here. I should have just… I don't know, moved to Florida. Like Gilly. Where _**is**_ Gilly? Why isn't she here? This is a crisis, isn't it? I could be going to prison for killing thirty-eight women with body scrub! At _least_!"

As Sally's head dropped once again onto the table, Aunt Frances and Aunt Jet exchanged meaningful silent glances over her. She couldn't see them, but she could certainly feel them.

"Panicking is bad for the heart, Sally," Aunt Jet said gently, "not to mention all sorts of other bad things. We think… we know what's happened."

Feeling eight years old, Sally raised her head to look at Aunt Jet. "You do?" She asked, trying not to sound plaintive and hating that she did anyway.

It was Aunt Frances, not Aunt Jet, who answered.

"Do you remember the times I've spoken of my Ethan…?"

 

* * *

 **  
_Thirty-nine years ago…_   
**

Hands around the gatepost, one slender ankle crossed neatly before the other, twenty-year-old Frances waited impatiently for Ethan to arrive. Her younger sisters Bridget ('Jet,' the world dubbed her) and Alice finished the new dress she wore ten minutes ago, and in it she felt birthed into something new. The skirt was short and full, made in accordance to the latest mode, with a daring neckline that swooped. It was yellow and offered her skin and dark hair a golden whiff of the exotic. Like the scent of the Spanish limes that permeated the greenhouse, the kitchen, and her hands.

Ethan arrived at the front gate, his arms filled with orange lilies and strawberry globe amaranth. Passion and immortal love, Frances thought, knowing they were nothing but flattery and petals, caring not at all. A man who spoke the language of flowers as fluently as Ethan was rare, indeed. She threaded her fingers through his, and led him across the dark front lawn and into the foyer.

"Wait here," Frances breathed, and into the kitchen she went to find a vase and fill it with water. Her heart fluttered with the giddiness of new love, although she and Ethan had done this many times in the last two months. Sometimes she suspected a helping hand from her sisters, but if so, their craft was far too subtle to catch. No bells tolled when her eye fell to the delectable frame of her gentleman suitor. There had been no breath of lilac at Ethan's touch; no sweetness of molasses on his tongue when she first kissed him, full and deep.

Perhaps Jet and Alice knew better than to meddle in her affairs. Frances meddled more than any three women of the last two Owens generations combined. If anyone knew how to sniff out a love spell, she would.

But Ethan's declarations of love weren't genuine. Or at least, they weren't yet. Because he was still alive. Because no deathwatch beetle had come a-chirping a challenge to Frances' claim, as the family curse dictated.

Frances left the bouquet on the kitchen table in her mother's best blue china jug, and hurried back out to lead Ethan into the night. Her fingers tightened on his wrist. Perhaps the deathwatch beetles didn't come because Ethan was a powerful witch in his own right. On the island of Barbados, where he and his twin brother Elliot were raised, men could be witches too, of a sort. A man who understood curses and hexes should be able to stand against them.

Beneath the shadows of the trellis at the foot of the garden, Frances kissed Ethan brazenly. Possessively. Surely a centuries-old broken heart would not stand between Frances and her happiness. And anyhow, she was not about to live her life in fear of it. Ethan's lips tasted of salt and tingled with power, and she sifted her fingers through the soft hair at the back of his neck; drew him tight.

* * *

A month later, Ethan proposed. Frances accepted. Still the deathwatch beetles did not chirp. Alice, Jet and Frances now intermixed tatting intricate flowers on pillowcases and handkerchiefs with love spells and candle making. For the women of the island (and some beyond) still came, as they'd come to visit their grandmother and her sisters, and their great-grandmother and hers. Always, as Jet put a dab of orris root upon their tongue, and cinnamon oil upon their lips, she offered the same warnings: _perhaps you should find someone more suitable. Perhaps you should move on. This will be how you ask it to be, but it may not be how you want it. Are you sure?_

And the answer was always the same: _Yes. I don't care. I want him so much._

With her curse, Maria Owens doomed her descendants to a life of serving love without receiving it; a life of engendering passion in others while living alone.

Well… except for Great Aunt Patty. She'd the good sense to turn out a lesbian, and was living quite happily in California, raising grapes. Coupeville was shocked too speechless even to condemn, but Frances only thought, _good for her._

The unfortunate woman who'd come for a love spell would show them a photo of her reluctant paramour and name him. She would be advised against it, and insist, and pay. Jet would cut a lime in four quarters, the woman would sprinkle it with sugar (for the bitterness and the sweet), speak the incantation, and Alice would nick her wrist with a knife dipped in the juice of dried figs and crushed juniper berries.

They never came back. But Frances heard things. Nearly always, the spells brought passion for a time, then heartbreak, pain, and loneliness. Sometimes the woman suffered, and sometimes everyone around her suffered.

And yet, more women always came. Such was love. Such was why Frances had accepted Ethan's engagement, knowing full well what the consequences might be.

Ethan had not been bespelled, not like the loves of the women in Coupeville. His love seemed real, growing more real with each day, and still the deathwatch beetles left him be. Frances chose a pattern for her wedding dress, bought the fabric, and hoped.

* * *

At midnight on a new moon, on the autumn before the ceremony, a strange sound pulled Frances from her sleep. She lay in the dark for an hour, tasting vague worries and listening to the ever-present drone of the sea. The sound came again. Again. High and insistent, faster and faster.

 _It's only an insect;_ Frances reassured herself, _a late cicada._ Although it was far, far too late in the year even for the most long-lived cicada with the most extreme insomnia. _It's just a bug. I'll deal with it in the morning._

Frances tossed and fretted; dreamed strange nightmares afterward filled with terror and cold suffocation.

Beneath her window, in the black starlit void of the cold autumn ocean, Ethan sank to his death.

There was at least some consolation: he truly had loved her.

* * *

Ethan's twin arrived in Puget Sound a week later. Frances had not known they were identical. She was raking leaves over the fallow autumn garden rows when Elliot swung up the path with Ethan's jaunty step.

It would be the only time in her life that Frances fainted.

She struck her head on the handle of her rake on the way down, and irreparably damaged the rosemary plant by the gate. Jet – at the kitchen window at the time – rushed out of the house to help her. Her view obscured by ivy, she saw Elliot for the first time when she leapt from the porch and found him standing over her sister.

Needless to say, had Jet not been made of sterner stuff, she might have joined her poor sister on the ground. As it was, she paled and demanded to know his name and his business.

Elliot introduced himself as the late Ethan's twin. His brother wrote often about his charming and beautiful fiancée, Elliot said. Since he'd come to America from Barbados to gather up Ethan's belongings, Elliot wanted to meet her. He thought they could help each other. His face was writ in pale grief.

When Frances woke, she was in no mood to be polite. She handed Elliot off to Jet and stormed into the house.

* * *

 **  
_Present day…_   
**

"If your perfect, impeccable Auntie Jet has one flaw, it's that she's sometimes far too honest. At the worst, worst possible time," Aunt Frances said. Sally looked from Frances to Jet, questioning.

"I never believed in the curse," said soft-voiced Aunt Jet, a trifle defensive. Her slim, wrinkled fingers went on stripping the thin fleshy leaves of rosemary.

"If you didn't believe in it, you shouldn't have mentioned it," Aunt Frances retorted. Her dark eyes flashed with ancient hurt, but the rest of her remained languid and mild.

Aunt Jet lifted her chin regally, but spoke to Sally rather than Aunt Frances. "Anyhow, if your gracious, considerate Auntie Frances had courage enough to accompany me with Elliot, we might have avoided the calamity."

"Calamity?" Sally lifted her head from her curled fists, blinking from one aunt to the other in growing fear. "What calamity? What does this all have to do with my shop?"

"Well?" Aunt Frances demanded, glaring at Aunt Jet, "Tell her."

"Don't put this all upon my shoulders," Aunt Jet waved an angry hand from her rosemary in Aunt Frances' direction, sat back, and folded her fingers above her stomach. She closed her eyes, and as the minutes passed, Sally wondered if she would explain at all. Then, softly, the loose lines of her face eased into an expression of real weariness, and Aunt Jet began to speak.

"I… believed – still believe! – that Ethan's death was a tragic accident. But I felt so comfortable with Elliot, and he was so sad. I thought I could confide in him. Yes, I was quite naïve, you needn't point it out, Frances," Aunt Jet opened her eyes and leveled an impatient glare upon her sister, who sat open-mouthed in the business of inhaling to speak. "He is the brother of your fiancé. Had things not gone the way they did, he would have been my brother in law. And he is a witch."

"Hogwash," Aunt Frances snapped, "You've always been a sucker for lost puppies, Jet." She leaned toward Sally. "Those six miles of exposition were just lead-up: Elliot found out about the family curse." Her long red nails ticked off the crimes committed: "I knew about it, I believed it, and I went after Ethan anyway. He called me a black widow spider, and he swore vengeance on the Owens clan for as long as he lived."

"He was rather melodramatic," Aunt Jet mused, her frown replaced by a faint, wistful smile, "I suppose that was his Spanish heritage coming out."

"'Spanish heritage,' piffle. Barbados was _Portuguese_ before it was a British colony. And they were from Wales and you know it, Jet. Growing up on some wild island can't unmake a Welshman." Frances rolled her eyes, flagrantly abusing italics in her tone.

* * *

 **  
_Thirty-nine years ago…_   
**

Elliot's accent was a strange amalgamation of several things, as Ethan's had been, and Frances' wounded heart skipped painfully when he called her out onto the porch. Her mother always called Frances 'a proud thing,' and the simmering grief made her cold. The chill in her expression could have called down a nor'easter if she'd put an ounce of power behind it.

"Frances Owens!" Elliot thundered from the front walk, "You are cursed, is this true? You and your family will kill all men who love you? Is this true?" His knees were bent, fingers curled as if preparing for attack. On the edge of the ocean, great anvil clouds began to billow. Jet cried out in desperate negation and pelted the short distance to stand on the steps between Elliot and her sister. Alice, drawn by the raised voices and the agitation of her siblings, came out to join them. Long blonde hair swinging, she stepped to the porch railing and leaned on it, mockery in her smile. Elliot was too far away to see the anger in it, but Frances saw it plain.

"Don't you know about us?" Alice asked, insolent, "We kill our husbands. Our mother did, our grandmother did, our great-grandmother." She shook her head slowly and the hair swung like a thick pendulum over her shoulder. "We're just pretty praying mantises."

"Alice!" Jet hissed. She turned back to Elliot, eyes entreating, one hand lifted to quell him.

"He's angry, Jet," Frances said, toneless, "he's got a perfect right to be. His brother is dead and I killed him."

"You didn't! He drowned! It was an _accident._ "

"My brother won swimming medals!" Elliot cried. Lightning unseamed the sky over the slate gray sea.

"Of course he did." Alice snapped, smile turning feral now with the comprehension of the power Elliot drew to him. She crept towards the stairs, one slim handed lifted out to him, palm forward. "Bad decision, Elliot. You have no right to judge us. You have no idea who we are."

"We are sorry about what happened to Ethan," Jet added, "we all knew him, and we all loved him. Please—"

Suddenly, everything stilled. The wind – just beginning to whip curls of clammy humidity from the shore – died instantly. The fallow autumn branches did not rustle and creak. Even the few remaining birds were silent. Frances could feel the assembling of great power, like a hand along her skin. A glance to either of her sisters confirmed that they, too, felt the rising.

Elliot's wounded expression twisted and Frances wanted to strike him. Years later, when she thought of Ethan's face, she would first remember Elliot's snarl.

"You treacherous women," he spat, "I pledge you this. By all I am, I'll strike at you. I won't rest until you lose a thing as dear to you as my brother is to me." His smooth, planed features split with an unholy smile, "You'll know this grief. I promise it."

"We would know it _without_ your help," Frances said.

* * *

 **  
_Present day…_   
**

"He was very, _very_ melodramatic," Aunt Jet amended. She was still smiling, albeit thinly.

"You like him!" Aunt Frances accused. "Jet, that ass tried to destroy our family!"

Meanwhile, Sally had once again folded her head in her arms. She worried at her lower lip, and picked at the edge of one sleeve. "That poor man," she said. Her mother – the powerful and strong-willed Alice that Sally never knew – had died of a broken heart, leaving her sisters alone. Sally nearly lost Gilly for want of a little good sense. She sympathized, and while the aunts bantered with one another, Sally knew they did, too. Her guardians from an early age, the aunts were familiar to Sally as the lines in her own palms. They blustered and cackled and frothed and swore, and they were the most loving and understanding creatures she'd ever met beneath the surface. Poor Elliot, and poor Aunt Frances.

"He lost his twin brother. And anyway, we've been cursed with worse," Aunt Jet was saying. In response, Aunt Frances only snorted and rose from the table, empty coffee cup in hand.

"You still haven't told me how this has anything to do with my shop," Sally said. Her brain slipped away from the drug of Frances' storytelling, back into the panic-inducing reality. She'd have to call her lawyer. She was insured against this kind of thing. She hoped. Would it be enough for all those people?

"Oh, honey," Aunt Frances turned away from the sink she'd begun to fill with the lunch dishes, "I'm sorry. It's the limes."

"The _limes_?" Sally jerked upright.

"Yes, dear," Aunt Jet said, "the limes. You see – Ethan and Elliot's family owns a lime grove on Barbados. Before we used pigeons, we used limes, remember how I told you?"

"We started using pigeons _because_ we won't use limes anymore," Aunt Frances corrected. "They're messy even when they're not dead, and expensive, and troublesome, but at least we know where they come from."

Sally squinted. The limes. Elliot's family grew limes. Her mother, Aunt Frances and Aunt Jet once used limes – and so did she, for Verbena! But that was too far-fetched for Sally to believe. She knew from personal experience that grudges could span generations with heartache, but that was one family. A little more self-contained than the geography separating Whidbey Island from Barbados.

"You're saying that the limes… are…" Sally said, using the slow voice effective on lying daughters and exaggerating aunts.

"Cursed. Precisely, dear," replied Aunt Jet. "Thankfully, we devised a solution."

"A solution for what?"

"Your Auntie Jet never could tell a story properly," Aunt Frances sighed.

* * *

 **  
_Thirty-nine years ago…_   
**

Months passed without note, following Elliot's turbid twenty-four hour stay on Whidbey Island. Life continued. Eventually, Frances could even bring herself to once again participate in the endless toil of meddling in others' affairs.

Just before Halloween, however, things took a steep downturn.

Three love spells went awry in the span of a week, then three more. Not only did the sisters' client not win the object of her desire, in each case she found herself actively despised. The problems began subtly, and went without notice for some time, so by the point at which the women's troubles were beginning to draw attention, Frances, Jet and Alice had no less than two dozen active spells running amok.

With rising levels of concern, the Owens family shut their doors to outsiders and searched for an explanation. Ingredients were tested; books consulted. Again and again, their research turned up nothing. Meanwhile, trouble escalated. There had been one case of assault already reported, and two cases of stalking. In all three, the men under investigation seemed as confused by their own obsessive hatred as the police.

When January's first newspaper of the year detailed the near-fatal shooting of Emily Sharpe, Frances went to the hospital to see her. Nobody tried to stop her. Nobody barred her path. Emily Sharpe was alone in the world before she'd come to the door of the Owens sisters; that fact no more obvious than now.

"No," Emily wailed pitifully when her eyes focused blearily on Frances, "noooooo." She writhed in bed against the nest of tubes, shrinking away from the dark-haired woman coming towards her.

"Hush up," Frances demanded, "if I'd wanted you dead I'd have finished it by now."

Unusually rational for a Coupeville woman, Emily hushed up. Maybe it was the Vicodin.

Frances drew a rolling stool up to the side of Emily's bed. "We'll fix this. Something's wrong, and we don't know what yet. But we warned you, Emily. This isn't what you asked for. But you should have known better."

"I thought you could help me!" Emily's voice was rough. Frances felt a sharp twinge of empathy and guilt. Emily had been through an ordeal. Perhaps she deserved some consequence for her own hubris, but then, who worked the spell?

"Trust someone who knows," Frances replied, "we're the worst people to come to for help."

"You took my money," Emily accused. Frances shrugged.

"If we hadn't done what you asked, you'd have tried some other way to get to Jim. Maybe start a rumor. Maybe wear a trampy little skirt. Maybe get him drunk. What's the moral difference between a quart of scotch and a quartered lime?"

Beside her, in the hospital bed, Emily twitched violently. Her rapid pulse woke up the machines around her, all beginning to blip with more volume and insistence.

"Lime…" Emily moaned, "I smelled limes! Your satanic voodoo made Jim shoot me, you bitch!"

"You smelled limes?" Frances echoed blankly. Emily, incoherent, would not answer.

The answer fell together quickly after that. Three more days of feverish work with no sleep finally rewarded Frances, Jet and Alice with success. They'd kept the two crates of limes from October, purchasing no more and using none of the remainder. Every fruit traced its origin back to one of six trees. They could only hope this also applied to the first twenty-four.

On the night of January's full moon, the sisters brandished a silver knife in each hand and surrounded the heavy, ancient table in their kitchen. The tip of each blade had been seared hot, then dipped in a mixture of blessed thistle seeds and cayenne pepper mixed with tequila. Blades pointed downward, each one just pressing the rind of one of six limes. One fruit from each tree.

Jet – the easy best at vocal spellwork – began the invocation.

 _As we will, so mote it be.  
Mighty Hecate, hear our plea._

The others took up the chant, joining their voices to Jet's until their lips and lungs moved in unison. The candles flickered. The housecats drawn by the activity fled for safer quarters as power flowed into the circle and grew.

After the seventh repetition, Jet began again, now with the rhyme to break the curse.

 _Thorn of thistle, pierce the spell  
Cayenne, char it where it dwell;  
One fruit from the mother tree  
Evil crumble, curses flee._

Three wills wove into a single thread of focus, as Frances and Alice began to chant, fingers white around the hilts of their knives. Frances thought of Emily in her white hospital room; of the women before her. She thought of her own family. Magic could be the shredding ruin of life, so easily. In a way, it was like love. Like real love, and not the spellbound flame fanned by their little nudges and pokes.

But women would not stop pursuing love.

Not even Owens women.

They reached the seventh intonation, and with one motion, thrust a silver blade into the heart of each lime. Frances felt the power sliding down her fingers. She felt it disperse.

In the quiet of the moonlit kitchen, broken only by the roughness of their breath, Alice murmured, "Did it work?"

"We're not finished," Jet said. She gathered the cut and oozing limes into a heavy ceramic bowl, and took them out into the snowy January garden. There, she doused them with tequila, struck a match, and set them aflame. The oil in their rinds sent up little gouts of blue flame amid the orange, like round green suns.

* * *

 **  
_Present day…_   
**

"Obviously, Elliot found out where his limes were going," Aunt Frances lamented, "He must have seen the address on the invoice and guessed we were up to our usual tricks."

"The curse he's put on those trees causes any spell worked with it to turn back upon itself," Aunt Jet explained.

"But I didn't work a spell with those limes," Sally protested, "they went into body scrub."

Aunt Frances waved a finger at Sally, then turned back to the sink. "You're a powerful witch, honey. You don't have to work magic for it to be present in anything you truly love."

The kitchen slipped into quiet, homely sounds as Sally processed three decades of history and Aunt Frances did the lunch dishes. "No, we can't do it," Sally said with finality, "we can't do the same spell. I _used_ all the limes I ordered."

Now Aunt Jet rose from the table, scraping loose leaves of rosemary into her bowl with the side of her palm. "We'll just order more, dear. Elliot is obviously still upset. He'll be sure to send us the ones we need."

"Jet, you're a lunatic!" Aunt Jet protested, "Yes, the man will doubtless send us more cursed limes, but really, don't make it sound like he's doing us a favor!"

"Maybe he doesn't know about Alice. Once we've broken the curse, I think I'll write him a letter," Aunt Jet said. Frances and Sally stared, but made no protest. Arguing with Aunt Jet's logic was ultimately futile. And really, even Aunt Frances had to admit that there might be something to it, however unlikely.

"Do we really need to order two whole crates?" Sally asked, thinking of the cost as she reached for a pad of paper and a pen, "Even if everything is fixed, I'll be up to my— there's going to be legal issues."

"We can help with those. Since you're an innocent bystander, I don't think it will backfire. At least not into any major difficulties." Aunt Frances dried her hands briskly on the towel beside the sink, "Really, it's better to be safe than sorry."

Thinking of Betty desPlaines and her current skin affliction, Sally reluctantly agreed.

"Besides, we'll find a use for the leftovers," Aunt Jet offered.

Sally shook her head. "That scrub is _not_ going back on the shelf," she said adamantly.

"Of course not, dear," was Aunt Jet's astonished reply, "where do you think certain… evening traditions were founded?"

* * *

 **  
_Thirty-nine years ago…_   
**

"We have a lot of limes," Jet said, lifting one out of its fragrant pine crate. Frances did the same, feeling tired and emptied out. Even accounting for a few rotten fruits, the limes stayed mostly whole and sound on the frigid porch. And there were, as Jet pointed out, quite a few. Even with a few calming enchantments and a little induced forgetfulness, the island's women were not going to be coming back for that love spell in a long time. Not that the Owens sisters would use the limes as such anyway, even if they were technically purified.

"And we have a lot of tequila," Alice came out onto the porch, waggling the large bottle of alcohol still three-quarters full. "Ladies," she announced in a voice devoid of cheer, "I think we've earned this tonight."

Whatever their crimes, Frances decided they had, too.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Several things that might be relevant to fans of the movie and/or the book, _Practical Magic_ :**  
> **I chose a setting, because the movie is vague and all Internet research turned up conflicting details. Since the movie was filmed in Coupeville on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound (which is in Washington!), and commentary from the producers indicates that the setting was based on a town on San Juan island (also in Washington!), I chose Coupeville.
> 
> **Within the movie, and within all the research materials I could find short of the actual book, Sally and Gilly's mother doesn't have a name. This is frustrating, considering that she's Frances and Jet's sister, and thus important to any backhistory where they are young enough that she's involved. Since the original work was written by Alice Hoffman, I chose "Alice" for Sally and Gilly's mother, in honor of her.
> 
> **I did some admittedly surface-only research into Wicca and spellcraft. The spells here are created solely for the work and are not copied from anywhere as a means to break hexes or curses. For the interested, however, my research turned up Cayenne Pepper and Blessed Thistle as herbs used in curse-breaking spells, and the herbs listed in Frances, Jet, and Alice's "lime love spell (before the pigeons)" are listed, online anyway, as being frequently present in love spells. Limes are not, interestingly enough.


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